Dual wideband monolithically integrated millimeter-wave passive front-end sub-systems

Recent advances in micromachining have enabled the development of wideband millimeter-wave antennas with integrated beamformers presented in this paper. A combination of two radiators, both having consistent radiation patterns, is used to cover K-through W-band frequencies. Two planar log-periodic antennas are monolithically integrated with respective multi-stage micro-coaxial impedance transformers and filters to instantaneously cover K through Q-band and V through W-band with high rejection at the cross-over frequency. The low-band antenna uses a low-pass filter having a maximum insertion loss of 1.5dB at 50GHz. The band-pass filter of the high-band antenna achieves insertion loss <; 1dB for the pass-band with very deep rejection outside the pass-band. In addition, an end-fire log-periodic antenna operating in the higher band is also designed and integrated with the band-pass filter. VSWR of the end-fire log-periodic antenna with integrated band-pass filter is shown to be <; 2:1. A prototype 18 to 110GHz planar log-periodic antenna is fabricated and measured to demonstrate the validity of the computational models.